I did not marry a monster.

I married a person who chose, a thousand small times, the comfort of belonging to them over the harder work of belonging to us, until the sum of those small choices was a wife who could watch her daughter cry at a dinner table and look at the ocean.

Knowing it was gradual doesn’t make it hurt less.

In some ways it hurts more, because it means there was a version of her, and a version of us, that was real once, and that she let it go one easy compromise at a time.

Chapter 6 — The Restaurant

At the restaurant the room looked like a photograph of itself.